SEO

As most of our businesses (FluidSurveys, ReviewRoom) are online, SEO plays a critical role in increasing our customer base. Recently, I’ve been looking at a number of tools out there such as HubSpot and SEOMoz that are essentially hosted services that offer a number of tools such that help you do things like track your google ranking throughout time (i.e. see how you advanced or perhaps lost ground in the search engine listings). While looking at these services, I found an interesting company that offers installable tools that you can use to perform much of what is available in the previously mentioned hosted services. The name of the company is Caphyon and the name of the tools are Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.

Immediately, the advantage of buying installable software is that you’ll pay a fee once and then you won’t have to pay exorbitant monthly fees for the same service. So what do these tools do anyway?

Advanced Web Ranking

The primary goal of the tool is to help you keep track of how well your website ranks for different keywords on different search engines. In the case of FluidSurveys.com, we want to rank for a number of different keywords such as “Online Survey Software“, “Online Survey Tool“, and others. Because we serve different customers from all around the world, not only do we need to know how we rank for our keywords, but we also need to know how we rank in different countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, …). On top of this, we also want to know how our competitors are ranking in comparison to us.

Once you have an SEO strategy in place, you will need to be able to measure how effective your strategy is in order to be able to continuously improve it. You may start out trying something and realize that it not only doesn’t improve your rankings, but makes it worse. On the flip side, if you are trying something, and it is showing promise, then you want to do more of that. Without a tool to measure these stats effectively, you are blindfolded and can’t see whether what you’re doing is working or not. Could you get this data yourself without the tool? Yes… BUT, it’ll take at least an hour every time, if not more… in other words, after a few uses, the cost of the tool is completely justified.

The other cool thing about the tool is that it’ll show you visual graphs of how you’re ranking for different keywords across search engines over time and even how you rank against your competitors. The most important thing for us, that I found to be lacking in other tools, is the ability to track yourself on Google in different countries. As you know, the search engine rankings look different in every region and can even vary from city to city. This is especially important if you want to show your visitors from different countries different landing pages. You’ll basically need to know if the pages that you want to be showing are showing to the right people.

“Advanced Web Ranking” does also provide some tools for keyword analysis (they’ve also got a really cool keyword research tool). If you wanted to rank well for a term such as “Online Survey Software”, then you’d want to make sure that certain elements were present on your page. You’d want to ensure that you have the right keyword density and that your keywords have prominence on your page without being spammy. Using the built in keyword analysis tool, this entire analysis and even the comparison of the same metrics with your competitors is a click of a button away.

Finally, the tool also has the ability to produce reports in seconds. These are great for showing others in the office how the website ranking is progressing. The reports are actually HTML based and dynamic. In other words, the reports produced are web pages – you’ll even be able to upload them somewhere for sharing. The data in itself is also available in csv format so you can open the data and manipulate it as you wish in MS Excel.

The only real downside to using a tool like this vs just using a hosted service is that you’ll have to run the tool on a daily or weekly basis so that it can go and grab all the latest rankings. The software does make up for this, in a way, by allowing you to schedule the updates- although, for this, the program has to be running. Interestingly enough, if you really wanted to, you could also just get the server version of the software and run it within your own network. The cool thing about the server version is that you’ll even be able to add users and authentication to ensure that only the right individuals have access to the data. Through the roles/permission settings available, you’ll even be able to determine who can see what – basically all the fancy stuff that you would need to make use of in a multi-user environment.

One advantage of a hosted tool, though, is that you technically don’t have to worry about losing your data. The company that is providing the service will usually keep its promise on maintaining backups and ensuring a certain level of up-time. With a desktop-based tool such as Advanced Web Ranking, you’ll have to take the backups yourself. The good news, though, is that the tool does make it easy to procure these backups and also makes it easy to load them back.

Before I wrap up, I’ll talk a bit about the other product from Caphyon: Adanced Link Manager…

Adanced Link Manager

One of the important elements in SEO is to ensure that you have quality links pointing back to your pages (i.e. link popularity). If we wanted FluidSurveys to rank well for “Online Survey Software”, it would be tremendously helpful to have other websites that talk about relevant topics (survey blogs and such) to link back to FluidSurveys.com. In an ideal world, the text of this link would say “Online Survey Software.” Generally speaking, the more links point back to your domain, the more your domain will have authority. Search engines will naturally show domains with more authority higher in search engine listings – hence the need for a powerful link manager to help you manage this process.

In order to be able to track how many sites point back to your website, you can use a tool such as “Advanced Link Manager.” The tool will not only tell you how many websites and domains point back to your site, but it’ll even tell you what “anchor text” is used for these backlinks. In traditional Caphyon goodness, you’ll also be able to graph how these stats change over time + do the same for competing websites. The software also allows you to do much of the same things that you could do with “Advanced Web Ranking” – creating and sharing reports, exporting results, etc…

Finally, the software also allows you to figure out if websites that you are linking to are exchanging the favor – in cases where they’re not, you can take action respectively if it makes sense. From a competitive standpoint, you can also find out how your competitors are getting their link juice – this can give you ideas on which websites you can contact in order to get links pointing to your site as well.

Conclusion

I did spend most of this post, talking about Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced link manager. This doesn’t mean that this is the only software out there. You should choose something that works for you and has the functionality that you need. I found about these products on SEOBook.com. They actually strongly recommend the software on their tools page. They’re pretty reputable and so I trust their recommendation + the tools are working well for us at our company

I’ve recently become very interested in search engine optimization. It’s quite an interesting field as it’s always growing and changing. Like most other fields, you’ll really have to follow a lot of blogs/forums in order to keep up to date.

A question that I’ve recently been asking myself quite a bit is whether we should launch international versions of FluidSurveys… i.e. fluidsurveys.ca, fluidsurveys.co.uk, etc… The primary reason for this pondering, of course, is because FluidSurveys currently ranks very well in Canada but not as well in the United States. It’s interesting because we have offices in the US and Canada and we target users in both countries. In terms of our customer base, we have customers all over the world…

So the question is, why do we rank so well in Canada and not so well in the US?

From what I’ve been able to gather, this primarily has to do with the fact that most of the backlinks that we have pointing to the website come from Canada and our webservers are located in Canada. It seems very weird that search engines should even care where a site is hosted. I always figured that people would host their websites wherever they could find good service… Why should someone have to host their website in the UK if they want to rank well there. Although, I can’t be certain that this is a determining factor, I hope that it isn’t…

In terms of Top Level Domains, yes we do own some international domains but we have them all pointing to the .com (permanent redirects). All of our backlinks are to the .com as well so those domain names shouldn’t play much of a factor.

But, backlinks can’t be the only factor though… it wouldn’t make sense since search engines would still have to determine which countries the backlinks belonged to… I suppose top level domains are one of the ways that search engines can figure out which countries those backlinks are coming from… I think that the one remaining factor is content… I think that the content on the domains probably plays a major role here as well…

So, if I had to summarize, I would have to say that the most important factors in ranking well internationally (in order) would be:

1) Content in Your Website (name of country, name of city, language)
2) Meta Tags (i.e. specifying language)
3) Backlinks from Websites from your Country
4) Top Level Domains
5) Location of Your Server

Again, there is no way to know for sure unless of course someone from Google/Microsoft would like to weigh in…

Aydin.